"In two days it'll be our forty-fifth," she tells Bill. "Did you remember?"
"Of course!" he says. "And your mother said it wouldn't last!"
"I don't think she actually said that," she says.
"But she thought it."
"Well, I'll admit that she wasn't all that crazy about you at first." Tessa smiles. "But she came around. Everyone, sooner or later, always does."
"Does what?" Bill asks.
"Succumbs to your charm."
She knows he likes hearing that, and it's her pleasure to pump his ego. Poor dear balding darling! They do tend to argue a bit, she and Bill, but the litany they often recite between them these days is how good their life together has been. When Tessa tries to image what her life would be like if he died first, the idea weighs so heavily in her chest that she has to gasp for breath.
"Are you going to be home today at lunch-time?" Bill says.
"Why do you ask?"
"What do you mean, why do I ask? It seems to me that 'yes' or 'no' is all that is required. You make a epic novel out of everything!"
"I just wondered if there was some reason you needed me to be here at noon today, that's all, Grouch!"
"If I had had some reason, I would have said so. All I ask from you is a simple answer!"
"I don't give simple answers!" she says.
"Don't I know it!"
"I never did. It's part of the baggage I brought with me. No one in my family ever gave simple answers! Except maybe my dad. But then, he was so much like you are. I guess that's what first attracted me to you. Only, I didn't realize it at the time."
"Okay, so, will you?"
"Will I what?"
"Be here at lunch time?"
"No, I'm meeting Joan and Rachel at Atria's Restaurant in Mt. Lebanon."
"Okay," he said. "Then I won't bother stopping in before my afternoon sessions at the office." He hugged her. "No use coming home if you're not here."
"See?" she said in triumph, you did have a reason for asking!"
"I give up," he said.
Later, driving to the south end of the city to meet her friends, Tessa's mind wanders back to the ugly old triangular-shaped building that was their first home. We loved those three cramped little rooms, she thinks. To us they were heaven. As a matter of fact, they were close to it, being on the fourth floor. There was no elevator, but we didn't expect conveniences -- not at sixty dollars a month, which was reasonable even by 1955 standards. She smiles, remembering.
.........................
Sarah wasn't the problem. The problem was the bedroom's dimensions. The only way they could fit her crib in the room was to wedge it right up to their double bed and shove the bed against the opposite wall. That meant they had to step up onto the bed, walk across it, and climb down on the other side, just to reach the door. But beautiful little Sarah, with her headful of black ringlets where most three-week-olds had only peach fuzz, was worth it. She was their first-born.
In those days, there wasn't much done about birth control, at least among Catholics, and although Tessa wanted children very much, with Bill still in school, she worried about having to quit her job. Maternity leave was still many decades in the future, and working mothers of new-borns were a rarity more censured than pitied. Still, they managed. Bill, in his last year of medical school under the G-I Bill, was receiving a small living allowance from the government, and before their marriage, Tessa had squirrled away over three-thousand dollars in the bank. Bill also worked three nights a week while finishing up his last year of Medical School, and by the time Sarah was six months old, he had graduated and took an internship that paid seventy-five dollars a month. Later, out of the goodness of its heart, the hospital raised it to a hundred.
The whole first four months of their marriage, Tessa had worried that she might not be capable of having children.
"I'm scared, Bill," Tessa said.
"Scared of what?"
"That I won't do right by her," she said. She's so little and so precious, and sometimes I feel like I'm not even grown up yet myself."
"You'll do just fine, Tessa," he said. "I guess most new mothers might feel that way.For godsakes, Tessa, you're almost twenty-three! You fret about everything! You're not happy unless you have something to worry about. You fester and fester until you find something!"
He was always analyzing her! Medical students think they know it all! All through her pregnancy he had analyzed. Everytime she wanted a little attention, he said that all pregnant woman act that way. No matter what she did, he nodded like a sage and told her it was normal for a prima-gravida. Everything was so damn perfectly normal! He told her a million times the whole birth thing was a natural, everyday thing. Well, sure, for him it was! She wondered what she had ever seen in him anyway. Almost immediately she was sorry for the thought.
"Oh, Bill, I wish I could be calm about things the way you are! Will you give her her bath again this evening when she wakes up?"
"No. You have to start doing that."
"Please, Bill. Suppose I drop her? You're so experienced and all."
"You won't drop her! Gee whiz, Tessa, grow up! Oh, okay, I'll bathe her tonight, but don't you think you start taking full charge? What will you do when I fly to Toledo next Friday for my internship interview? I'll be gone all weekend, you know."
She groaned. "Oh, I forgot! That means I'll be alone with her! I'll just have to move in with my folks until you get back." She relaxed a little, visualizing how, calm and capable, her mother would take over.